3 posts - Scottish Borders, Dumfries and Galloway, Clackmannanshire

Role Reports To: Delivery Leader

Department:Delivery

Overview

Volunteering Matters is a national volunteering and social change charity. We use the unique power of volunteering to resolve some of the UK’s most pressing social issues. In collaboration with local authorities, we have created a programme to support improvement in services for care experienced young people.

The system of public, private and third sector providers across a range of local services tend to be designed for people who are able to engage with little or no support. People of all ages have barriers to engaging in services and care experienced young people can have more barriers than most. For care experienced young people, whilst they have talent and potential, they face some of the starkest outcomes of any group in society given their additional barriers, and a legacy of discrimination, oppression, and a lack of access to resources and opportunities.

What is the problem we are trying to solve? Despite the challenges, there is a considerable growing consensus and momentum around the idea that care experienced young people cannot rely on services and infrastructure that have been designed without their input or have not been specifically designed with their needs in mind.

By making use of the Scottish Approach to Service Design and supporting No One Left Behind Principles, we therefore want to give care experienced young people a voice and an opportunity to influence change by involving them in the design of services and opportunities, providing them a platform to have their voices heard.

Role Purpose

As our Engagement Manager working in one of the above-mentioned local authorities, you will work closely with care experienced young people to empower them to have a voice and to support them to identify and review referral pathways within the local authority. You will provide an independent and improvement-orientated framework to self-assess services relating to care experienced people.

The ambition is then to co-design necessary services to fill gaps, providing a supported pathway for care experienced young people on their journey to sustainable fair work. Finally, we hope to support in re-orientating existing structures, services, commissioning frameworks and pathways to enable improvement whilst offering peer support and learning opportunities for all areas under review.

The role involves working closely in collaboration with local services and within local governance and with the Improvement Service to make positive change. This programme is currently operating in three local authorities in Scotland – Clackmannanshire, Scottish Borders and Dumfries and Galloway, so there will be opportunities for shared learning and peer support.

Key Duties & Responsibilities

• Collaborate with local authority to identify the appropriate and relevant departments and services requiring auditing and review
• You will attract, recruit and support care experienced young people to undertake an audit of pathways and services. Undertaking surveys, observations, questionnaires, and focus groups
• You will work closely with these individuals to identify the current processes and procedures within the relevant services and complete a mapping exercise to what the “exiting care” journey looks like for all care experienced young people
• Together with the young people, you will identify the existing interventions and their effectiveness against the improvement plan
• Create networks and conversations which enable local authorities to learn from care experienced individuals and families and develop collaborative learning opportunities
• You will develop evidence-based findings and recommendations and present back to decision makers to take the first steps of changing the lives of care experienced young people
• Recognise the confidential and sensitive nature of personal information relating to children, young people, and families and how this should be communicated, used, published, shared, recorded, and handled appropriately
• Contribute to the wider Volunteering Matters team, always upholding our values
• Establish and maintain effective working relationships and communication lines with colleagues, volunteers, young people, families, partners, and others
• Administration tasks including maintaining up- to- date, effective and accessible records and the use of Microsoft Office and other software packages

Person Specification

Skills

• A strong passion and commitment to volunteering, our organisational values and flexible working strategy
• Excellent communication and facilitation skills with a strong ability to influence and motivate others
• Excellent people skills, including being able to develop professional and effective relationships with a range of stakeholders
• Excellent organisational and time management skills, including the ability to plan effectively
• Self-motivated, ability to work on own initiative, ability to multi-task, an approachable manner, team player and sound judgement skills
• Excellent administration and IT skills, including the use of Office 365 and Microsoft Teams

Experience

• Awareness and understanding of effectively supporting care experienced young people or families
• Experience in identifying and delivering effective change
• Effective teamwork including building effective relationships with internal and external partners
• Experience of group facilitation/ running activities or events to engage children, young people and families
• Volunteer Management
• Child Protection/Adult Protection and Safeguarding process and policies
• Experience of achieving ambitious goals and targets, completing a high standard of work to meet successful outcomes

Qualifications

Relevant experience and values alignment is more important for this role than specific qualifications

Other

The post will be home based however given the nature of this role you will be expected to work within the local community and be available to regularly engage with care experienced young people in a setting they feel most comfortable with.

Internet access to enable remote working is a requirement. IT equipment and infrastructure will be supplied. Post Covid-19 and in accordance with any social distancing guidelines there may be an expectation to travel across Scotland to engage with colleagues, volunteers and beneficiaries.

This role requires membership of the PVG (Protection of Vulnerable Groups) scheme. Having a conviction will not necessarily cause a bar to employment.

Our Values & Ways of Working:

In all that we do, we embrace a philosophy of ‘Freedom within a Framework’ and are guided by our values:

Empowering, Inclusive, Compassionate, Positive & Straightforward.

This job description is intended to include the broad range of responsibilities and requirements of the post.

It is neither exhaustive nor exclusive but while some variations will be expected, these will be at an appropriate level for the role.

Closing date: 12pm on the 20th October

CV and Cover letter to be emailed to kim.maxwell@volunteeringmatters.org.uk